A Brief Introduction to Photovoice: Concepts and Hands-onExperience (original) (raw)

A Practical Guide to Photovoice: Sharing Pictures, Telling Stories and Changing Communities

2009

Community people using photovoice engage in a three-stage process that provides the foundation for analyzing the pictures they have taken: 1. Selecting – choosing those photographs that most accurately reflect the community's concerns and assets. The participatory approach dictates this first stage. So that people can lead the discussion, it is they who choose the photographs. They select photographs they considered most significant, or simply like best, from each roll of film they had taken. Photographs alone, considered outside the context of their own voices and stories, would contradict the essence of photovoice. People describe the meaning of their images in small and large group discussions. 3. Codifying – identifying the issues, themes, or theories that emerge. Print

“I came, I saw, I conquered”: reflections on participating in a PhotoVoice project

The Journal of Mental Health Training, Education and Practice, 2021

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide first-hand reflective narratives fromparticipants of their involvement in the overall process, with particular reference to the benefits and challenges of engagement. Design/methodology/approach – Five participants agreed to write a reflective piece of approximately 500words on their involvement in the PhotoVoice project. Findings – The reflective narratives in this paper demonstrate the personal and professional benefits of sustained and meaningful engagement, while challenges such as power imbalances, identity management, time and cost commitments are discussed. Practical implications – PhotoVoice is a methodology that has the potential to democratise knowledge production and dissemination. Originality/value – There are scant examples in the PhotoVoice literature of the inclusion of participants involvement in dissemination activities. The reflective narratives in this paper demonstrate the personal and professional benefits of sus...

Picturing Reality: Power, Ethics, and Politics in Using Photovoice

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2012

This article considers research into barriers to learning (including HIV/AIDS) in a small, rural town in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A variety of qualitative participatory research methods were used, including photovoice, a method in which research participants take photographs and then decode these together with the researchers. Rich, thick data was obtained using photovoice, and the researchers found this method particularly useful for dealing with the ‘unspoken’ and working with marginalised people. This method, particularly because of the emotive nature of photographs, is also a potentially powerful political tool in exposing and exploring deepening levels of poverty and crisis experienced by the marginalised in post-apartheid South Africa. Photovoice as a method, however, raises issues of ethics and researcher-researched power dynamics; in particular, whether it is ethically acceptable to use photographs from consenting participants in light of the imbalance of power between t...

A systematic review of photovoice as participatory action research strategies

International Journal of Evaluation and Research in Education (IJERE), 2020

Photovoice research is conducted by researchers to communicate images or photographs, and it has high confidence in analyzing the value, story or meaning of an image. Several previous studies that examined photovoice as a research strategy were analyzed and reviewed. This systematic review used an article selection process. It was defining the purpose, conducting a literature search, pulling articles by reading abstracts, reading the full paper, data abstraction, and conducting an analysis. The photovoice article selection was classified into education, health, and social science domain. Finally, forty-one articles have been reviewed with the total of participants involved ranged from five to fifty individuals. The majority of research method in the articles was participatory action research (PAR) through qualitative inquiry or field visits. Meanwhile, the research instruments used photography, documentation, observation, and interviews. In various fields of research, photovoice is able to increase the understanding of individuals or groups to interpret the content of an image or photo.

Virtual Photovoice: Methodological Lessons and Cautions

The Qualitative Report, 2021

Photovoice is a type of participatory inquiry, which is a methodological and onto-epistemological stance that seeks to emancipate marginalized individuals, confront inequity, and work for social transformation. Photovoice incorporates Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education, documentary photography techniques, and feminist thought as an approach for community members to identify shared concerns and construct collective knowledge. It also seeks to challenge unequal power relations by disrupting hegemonic structures in the production of knowledge and policy, as photographs and accompanying descriptions can communicate powerfully about community needs and demands for change. University-based researchers or practitioners facilitate this communication by bringing community perspectives to the attention of government officials and others in positions of power. In this paper, we describe how we adapted this approach for virtual use during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We offer...

Working With Photo Installation and Metaphor: Re-Visioning Photovoice Research

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2019

The proliferation of participatory visual methods (PVMs) in applied research has highlighted new ways of seeing and thinking about research. A core tenant of PVMs is the situated, collaborative, reflexive, and co-constructed nature of the work and resulting findings. However, as these methods gain popularity, there can be a disparity between how PVMs are theorized, imagined, and facilitated. Although the facilitated and reflexive nature of PVMs is generally understood by practitioners, researchers seldom report on pedagogical design of their projects, even though the facilitation of a method, and a researcher's own lens and orientation to photography will influence the production and reading of images. To achieve greater congruence between paradigm and practice, it may be important to return to fundamental questions about the role of facilitation and the process of crafting and exhibiting images in photovoice in relation to one's study aims. In this article, I explore the crafted role of image-making in the context of a photovoice project that asked stakeholders to visualize engagement in the local HIV sector. Participants created and exhibited 63 photographs and narratives that relied heavily on metaphor as a crafted strategy. They also created three site-specific photo installations. Through detailing our facilitated process, I illustrate how certain design elements (influenced by my peda-gogical and theoretical orientations toward co-theorizing) created the necessary conditions for participants to visualize their ideas through metaphor and installation. In turn, the exhibited images and associated installations created new opportunities for synthesis, dialogue, and dissemination. I conclude with a theoretical discussion of the possibilities for taking a crafted and reflexive approach to image-making in photovoice studies.